Month: October 2016

A few months ago I finished a long piece on what some people call the Slippery Slope. In that article I only really looked at the “feminine spectrum,” meaning people who were assigned male at birth and feel uncomfortable living as men, or who feel a desire to live as women. I have the impression that there are processes happening on the masculine spectrum that are similar in some ways and very different in others. For your reference, here are my four recommendations again:

Don’t repress yourself.

Invest in your masculine identity.

Don’t invest too much in your feminine identity.

Spread out your significant gender events.

My post has gotten some hostile reactions from transitioned trans women around the Internet, which might surprise you if you remember that it was specifically intended for people who had either decided not to transition or hadn’t made up their minds. I was very explicit that it is not relevant to people who’ve decided to transition. So why do these transitioned women care so much about it?

While my analysis builds on ideas like the Tri-Ess “FIBER” principles, I believe that the last two elements are mostly new. This means that any trans women who transitioned before I posted it in January was unaware of these recommendations. While many of them always intended to transition, some decided not to at some point and then changed their minds, and others chose to experiment before making a decision.

That means that even though these trans women aren’t covered by my article, they used to be. And here we get into territory I covered a couple of years ago in my post on the Essential Conflict between transitioners and non-transitioners. Transition is really, really hard, and transitioners often find themselves wondering whether they made the right choice. This can be particularly upsetting if the person had previously made a commitment not to transition. To reassure themselves, many are drawn to beliefs that frame the issue as inevitable, and thus not really a choice.

The thing is that in a lot of cases I would agree with their final decision to transition. I’ve known many trans women who have spent months or years tormented by dysphoria, shame, inner conflict and outside harassment. For them, transition seems as good a way to get out of it as any I know.

What I won’t do is to say that transition was in their destinies since they were conceived, or since the hormones in the womb, or since puberty. I won’t say that they couldn’t have done anything to prevent the misery that they felt before their final decision. I won’t even say that that misery wasn’t the result of their choices.

To say any of those things would mean accepting that there is some difference between us that can only be known by whether we transition and live without detransitioning for the rest of our lives. Or else it would mean believing that my own transition is inevitable and that I’ve been lying to myself and my family for over twenty years. I see no evidence of either of those ideas, and I’m not going to pretend I do to spare these people’s feelings.

My observations suggest that if some of these trans women had managed their gender expression differently, their discomfort with their lives might not have gotten to be so unbearable that transition became the preferred choice. That is not their fault, though, because nobody had figured out yet that investing too much in a feminine identity or having too many significant gender events could increase gender dysphoria. On the contrary, most of the discourse around gender issues have portrayed dysphoria and transition as being contingent on factors that are innate and unchanging, and can not be avoided or exacerbated, only discovered.

There is no criticism implied in any of this. Without any idea that our actions could affect our dysphoria, why would we expect anyone to pay attention to frequency or identity development? And why would we blame them for doing what the experts told them to do?

On this National Coming Out Day, a lot of it feels so old news. I came out in 1996 – over twenty years ago! And yet I’m still uncomfortable talking about my sexuality. I say the word “transvestite,” but I don’t stress what it means. I posted a version of this last year as a private post on Facebook, but I’ve been afraid to put it in a blog post, or even a tweet – afraid that if people find out it will destroy any credibility I have as a trans person, destroy my social life, and make people not want to hire me.

On some levels it seems like we’ve made such strides in terms of openness and acceptance of sexuality, and on other levels it feels like we’re stuck back in 1950 or even 1880 and haven’t moved an inch. Even in terms of trans acceptance, we’ve made progress, but only at the cost of a lot of us denying our sexuality. Is that really progress?

Anyway, I’m a transvestite. And yes, that means I’m transgender. Are you a transvestite too? Happy National Coming Out Day!

F – Full personality expression, in a blending of both our masculine and feminine characteristics. We do not wish to destroy our birth gender but to develop all our human potentials and be all we can be.
I – Integration of our masculinity and femininity to create a happier, more complete person as we use our enhanced understanding of ourselves in our daily lives.
B – Balance between masculinity and femininity in our total personalities.
E – Education of crossdressers toward self-acceptance, education of our families toward understanding, education of society toward the acceptance of crossdressers as ordinary people with a special gender gift.
R – Relationship – building in the context of crossdressing.

I’ve never been to a Tri-Ess meeting, so I’m mostly going off of the summary on their website. The “Don’t repress yourself” and “Invest in your masculine identity” principles echoes the TRI-ESS ideas of Full expression and Integration.

When I went to look up FIBER, the Tri-Ess website was down. The organization has been losing membership for years due to many factors, including their denial of membership to anyone who transitions or is not “heterosexual.” The heteronormative standards were extremely problematic, as Harvey Fierstein illustrated so masterfully in his play Casa Valentina. The restrictions on transitioning can justified by the different needs of transitioners and non-transitioners, but it certainly seems like the percentage of trans people who transition has grown over the past twenty years.

One major difference is what constitutes a proper Balance between genders. The Tri-Ess website doesn’t specify a particular mix, and the impression I have from what I’ve read over the years is that some people tried for a fifty-fifty mix, some went for the maximum feminine expression they felt their families and employers would accept, and others never chose a specific mix, just harboring a vague feeling that they wanted more feminine expression than they had.

From what I’ve seen, to be satisfied with your gender situation it’s not enough to have any old Balance. The balance needs to be heavily weighted to the gender you’ve chosen, and it takes some conscious work to maintain it. If you choose one that’s fifty-fifty or weighted the other way – or if you pay lip service to Balance without setting a specific balance – you’ll be forever off balance.

The other major difference is that I specifically recognize the contributing role of gender fog – wetting the grass on the Slippery Slope, if you will. This is a very tricky point to make, because so much of activism is about empowering people by proclaiming the essential rationality of all. How can you empower your group while acknowledging that you are not always rational? But we have to acknowledge it, or we will continue to have unwanted, ill-considered transitions.

This also gets back to the mission of Tri-Ess and its dwindling membership. If Tri-Ess is restricted to trans women who don’t transition, but they have never informed their members about an important factor that can undermine their decisions not to transition, they have sown the seeds of their undoing.